California needs more controlled burns? Yes, but it’s not that simple
It seems like a no-brainer: the catastrophic fires that have swept through California in recent years could be made much less severe by a more effective and frequent use of controlled burns to thin the forest more. But although that seems to have some basic truth to it, the situation isn’t so simple nor is it so easy to achieve these burns. And the problem is not just the “save the endangered animals” groups. In fact, in reading about the pros and cons of the process, I haven’t found much about the environmental effect on animals as being the stumbling block. More problematic are the health problems of humans when the air quality suffers, as well as their perceptions about how much planned fire is tolerable.
At this point, California seems willing to increase the number of planned burns:
“Putting prescribed fire back out on the landscape at a pace and scale to get real work done and to actually make a difference is a high priority,” says Cal Fire chief Ken Pimlott. “It really is, and it’s going to take a lot of effort.”
In a February report, the watchdog Little Hoover Commission concluded that the way California landowners have collectively managed forests is an “unprecedented catastrophe.” In May, Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order to improve forest management, and with it, a dramatic change.
Now Pimlott says that Cal Fire intends to triple the amount of prescribed fire on lands the state controls.
“We can prevent these large catastrophic fires or at least reduce the intensity when fires do occur,” he says. “So a little bit of smoke now and a little bit of inconvenience now is well worth offsetting these large damaging fires.”
That’s a small step toward addressing a major deficit. According to the commission’s report, an area the size of Maryland—including state, private and federal land—needs maintenance or planned fire to become healthier.
So even Jerry Brown has been on board recently—although of course he’s not going to be governor for very long.
There are the obstacles to doing this, however:
Even with approval, federal wildland managers waited months for the right weather and environmental conditions here. Hinckley says those criteria range from wind speed and temperature, to how much water is in the soil. It was a very wet spring; on-and-off rains created several months of delay here.
Thick vegetation in the understory is a limiting factor, too. Hinckley says her crews often need to chop and flatten vegetation to make safe conditions for burning.
Even when all of the stars align, Hinckley says she might not have warm bodies for the job. That happened last fall, when fires up and down the state kept fire crews hamstrung.
“I didn’t have crews to perform prescribed burns,” she says, “because the wildfires take priority.”
Even when the permit is done and the weather is right and crews are available, the air might already be too polluted to add more smoke to the mix. Air regulators grant permission for burn days, and it’s hard to get: regional atmospheric conditions mean that smoke from Sierra Nevada forests funnels toward the central valley, where air pollution is consistently bad.
Whether from wildfire or planned burn, smoke feels like pollution to vulnerable lungs…
“We have to protect public health; that’s our mandate,” says Dar Mims, a meteorologist with the California Air Resources Board. “But we also recognize that we need burning in the forest, and a lot of those trade-offs have to happen in real time because the decisions have to be made—do we want to potentially impact the air basin, or do we want to burn.”
The public is upset when there are a lot of burn days, but there needs to be more education about why it’s important to do it anyway, plus the fact that there’s less air pollution from a controlled burn than a wildfire.
There’s much more more at the link, and I strongly suggest you read it.
There are dissenting opinions, however, about the value of thinning. Here’s one of them; the basic thrust of that article, however, is that thinning (another supposed forest-control strategy) is not particularly effective in reducing the severity of major forest fires out West:
In fact, mechanical thinning alone often INCREASES fire spread by putting more fine fuels on the ground.
Additionally, thinning in some instances can INCREASE fire spread by exposing the forest floor’s fuels to greater sun drying and greater penetration by wind through the open forest stands. What is surprising to learn is that often the most dense forest stands (i.e. those with the most fuels) do not burn well because they retain moisture the longest, and wind is impeded from pushing flames through such dense forests.
Second, thinning by removing competition between trees and brush often increases rapid regrowth of vegetation. Therefore, any thinning/fuels reduction program must have follow-up maintenance in the form of recurring prescribed burns and/or thinning to be effective. Yet most thinning projects do not even get the first prescribed burning, much less follow up burns.
The author of the article does recommend thinning near structures and towns, but not in general. And what about controlled burning, which is mostly what we’ve been discussing in this post? That’s a lot better, but as we already know it comes with a bunch of problems:
…[P]rescribed burning is risky, and the opportunity for agencies to set fires is limited to short windows of time. Many forest managers are loath to okay a prescribed burn unless conditions are ideal for containment. No one wants to be the person who signed off on a prescribed burn and then had it get away and burn homes to the ground. However, when conditions are good for controlling a blaze, they are usually not good for fire spread.
There is a movement to allow more thinning, but I’m not convinced thinning is the way to go compared with controlled burns (not that it’s either/or):
Members of the Western Caucus have proposed legislation to dramatically change the way forests are managed. If passed, this bill would give power back to local authorities and allow for more aggressive forest thinning without subjecting them to the most onerous of environmental reviews.
While state and federal governments can take measures to enhance forest and wilderness management, private management can also get involved to improve conditions.
One idea is to adopt a policy popularized by the school choice movement: create charter forests that are publicly owned, but privately managed. This would allow forest management to move away from top-down, bureaucratic control to a decentralized and varied system that may better conform with local realities.
Maybe the current fires will jump-start the implementation of better solutions. Knowing how bureaucracies work, however (and the extreme leftward tilt of the California state government), I wouldn’t bet on it.
But maybe there’s really reason for hope. For example, this article (hat tip: commenter “OBloodyHell”) that appeared in the very leftist Mother Jones last year, advocates more controlled burns:
Addressing the problem will require a revolution in land management and in people’s relationship with fire — and there are signs both may be beginning.
As a child in Southern California, Berleman was deeply afraid of wildfire. But at community college, she learned that Native Americans used fire for thousands of years to manage forests and grasslands and protect their villages. Tribes regularly burned California’s oak woodlands, for instance, to remove underbrush and fight pests. It helped them spot prey more easily, keep weevils out of the acorns they gathered for food, and safeguard their homes from wildfire. In 2009, Berleman transferred to the University of California, Berkeley to study fire ecology. There, she worked on her first prescribed burn. “I instantly fell in love with the ability to use fire in a positive way to accomplish objectives,” she says. She trained as a firefighter so she could put fire to use as a land-management tool.
That entire article is worth reading, too, because it indicates a number of ways in which the left—which, after all, is in the driver’s seat in California—could see its way towards supporting a much more aggressive use of controlled burns. One idea is to appeal by saying that Native Americans did it, so it must be good. Another is promoting the knowledge that since controlled burns are more likely to preserve trees than out-of-control wildfires would, the controlled ones disturb animals’ natural habitats far less. Another piece of useful knowledge in appealing to the left would be that the major incredibly hot and uncontrolled wildfires of late are the ones that release a lot of carbon:
The amount of carbon sent to the atmosphere from such an enormous fire is staggering. “It’s ugly,” says Collins. “It’s not only a huge initial loss just from the direct emissions, but it’s slow emission over time as these trees break and then fall to the ground and the decomposition process really gets underway. We’re looking at 30 years or 40 years of pure emissions coming from this area with very little on the uptake side,” Collins says.
Just the initial blaze released 5.2 million metric tons, roughly as much greenhouse gas emissions as 1.1 million passenger cars emit in a year, according to an estimate by Forest Service ecologist Leland Tarnay. It’s too soon to analyze the fire’s total carbon footprint.
Controlled burns are very different, and they often preserve the trees themselves, so their carbon footprint is not so onerous. That idea should appeal to those concerned with global warming.
Here’s how fires ordinarily work in forests that have been treated differently from each other:
The first patch of forest Collins shows me is the control forest, from which fire has long been banned. The understory is so thick with small trees and shrubs that it’s difficult to walk; we have to step over tangles of dead trees and branches. If a fire were to strike this area, it would easily climb from the ground to the lower branches and up into the canopy. “And then it can really spread,” Collins adds.
In the next patch of forest we visit, loggers cut down and sold some of the medium-sized trees in 2002. Then they shredded the small trees and underbrush using a big machine called a masticator, and spread the remnants on the forest floor. Now, the trees are widely spaced; sunlight shines through the canopy. The High Sierras are visible in the distance. If a fire were to come through here, Collins says, it likely would stay on the ground, and wouldn’t harm the trees or emit much carbon.
Again, I suggest you read the whole thing. It’s actually quite fascinating, and it is in agreement with the idea that although thinning has some benefits, controlled burns are a more effective way to go:
North says thinning is not a solution for much of the Sierra Nevada. Only 28 percent of the landscape can be mechanically thinned, he calculated; the rest is too steep or remote. “You cannot think your way out of the problem,” he says. “You’ve got to use fire.”
Official Forest Service policy has acknowledged this. The 2014 interagency National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy calls for expanding the use of prescribed burns and letting more wildfires burn. “It’s just not being followed; that’s the real problem,” North says. “Everyone knows what we’ve got to do. But it’s not being done.”
Why isn’t it being done more already? Partly because of old-fashioned thinking on the part of fire managers, but a big role is played by increased house-building in areas near or even in forests, and the fear of lawsuits from homeowners if planned fires get out of control and do damage to human dwellings.
The obstacles to controlled burns at this point do not seem to be the conservationists:
Craig Thomas, conservation director of Sierra Forest Legacy, has been calling for more natural and prescribed fire in the Sierra for two decades. He believes that after the Rim, Rough and King fires, the public and policymakers better understand the threat of unnaturally overgrown forests.
That was written before the current fires, and so I imagine that at this point the public understands the problem even better, although they might not understand the difference between thinning and controlled burns.
The article goes on to say that since 2015 the area of California in which fires are allowed to burn without stopping them has increased, and the number of controlled burns has increased as well. It seems it would be a good thing if the recent horrific fires in both northern and southern California would push residents of the state to accept more of the inconvenience and expense of controlled burns, in order to offset the far more catastrophic effects of major and uncontrolled forest conflagrations that spread to population centers.
Very interesting links! The reluctance to start controlled burns unless conditions are ideal is common. A few years ago, friends in Los Alamos, NM, had to evacuate after a controlled burn got out of control and threatened the town.
I had been wondering if shredding cut undergrowth would help, and the articles indicate it does at least out of the high mountains and steep canyons.
i’ve run across tales – so anecdote, not data – of homeowners who try to be smart about fire safety, clear their areas near the structures, etc. and jump through all government hoops who do it once, get hammered by busybody neighbors who simply won’t stop complaining about what they are doing, and just give up on doing anything ‘unusual’. That doesn’t help. These were people in Sonoma/Napa, who knew what do but their neighbors didn’t, and didn’t want to hear it, even when the local government didn’t support them.
Sonoma and Napa used to be a lot less wooded, 50 to 100 years ago. And there was a lot less fire danger.
I grew up in Eastern Kentucky’s mountain valleys. The hills are fully and thickly forested, and every few years the area would suffer through a bout of forest fires that would run through the mountains. However, never once were the fires the kinds I have seen in Yellowstone or California- not once. The main reason, I learned later, was that no one worked to put out the fires, or even control them- almost no one lived on the hills, so the regular fires prevented the buildup of combustible material.
Thinning seems to be working in the Ponderosa Pine forest around Flagstaff, AZ.
I’m not sure how much has been done or how much more needs to be done, but the thinned portions certainly look healthier than the still overgrown portions.
And just as a point of comparison to my experience growing up- here in Eastern Tennessee- the foothills of The Great Smoky Mountains- part of the same Appalachian chain I grew up in- the occasional fires are quickly put down by the The National Forest Service- that eventually failed in November of 2016 leading to exactly the kind of explosive and deadly forest fires seen in California- the area was only saved by a fortunate rain storm just as the fire started to blow completely out of control.
All this is 100 years late. Maybe too late. The same thing happened in the White Mountains of Arizona where 19 firefighters died several years
The forest had not been thinned. Much of the reason being the US Forest Service, which was opposed. The spotted owl thing has stopped lumber harvesting in most of the northwest. We are dealing with problems that were foreseen 40 years ago.
The Guardian, in spite of the climate nonsense, gets it.
These woodlands have evolved to burn lightly and consistently. In British Columbia, the trees tell the story. Blackened rings in their cores show the trees have been singed every 10 to 40 years. Then around the end of the 19th century, with the spread of human settlement and active suppression of fires, the burning stops.
“For most of the last 100 years the main method of fire management has been suppression. This has been effective at reducing fire in many regions,” said US Department of Agriculture senior scientist, Tom Spies.
In temperate forests where fire has been quashed, the understory grows thick and tall. Flames that are usually restricted to the ground, use that vegetation as a bridge to jump into the flammable treetops. When this occurs, the amount of available fuel increases exponentially. Add in a climate with greater extremes of heat and drought and you have the recipe for a firestorm.
The forest had not been thinned. Much of the reason being the US Forest Service, which was opposed. The spotted owl thing has stopped lumber harvesting in most of the northwest. We are dealing with problems that were foreseen 40 years ago.
IIRC, old growth forest accounts for about 2% of the inventory of Forest Service properties. It’s difficult to believe the spotted owl is that potent an impediment.
One anomaly here is the wretched excessive inventory of public land we have. We don’t need to sequester woodland in public agencies in order to maintain forest inventories. If you want to maintain forest inventories, you need a couple of policy measures:
1. All woodland would have a conventional assessed valuation of $0 per acre. You purchase 100 acres of woodland appended to your rural property, your property tax liability increases by $0. Property taxes incorporate a bias in favor of deforestation.
2. If necessary, a Pigou excise could be levied on timber harvests. You experiment with rates and select the one consistent with stable or slowly increasing forest inventories.
Once you institute these measures, you can turn the old growth forest over to the National Park Service or the Fish and Wildlife service and put the rest of the Forest Service’s inventory on the auction bloc. The one part of that agency you’d be sure to maintain would be the firefighting squad. Timber companies would increase acreage in some areas and reduce it in others. Underwriting charges one might guess would induce them to reduce inventory near population centers and add infrastructure to retard fires.
The trouble is, this would require a constitutional amendment which would, among other things, require state and local governments to so assess woodland property. Not holding my breath.
My take on all this is that, finally, the idiot “environmentalists” are being over-ruled by the people actually know what they are doing.
So many interesting topics & sub-topics.
“The Camp Fire” that hit Paradise was called that because it started near Camp Creek Road. San Jose Mercury News says their best guess is that it started from downed powerlines, since fire fighters were warned about those lines on the first call.
Controlled Burns:
Our community had a closed Army base with a large free fire field with unexploded ordinance. While the area was surrounded by small communities and one large community, when they did the controlled burn the smoke engulfed the big community. The left-wing snowflakes melted down. The political stink was worse than the smoke.
Another case was the Los Alamos Cerro Grande fire in 2000; maybe the one to which Kate referred. It started as a controlled burn in the Bandelier Nat. Monument, got wildly out of control and burned a huge swath of forest on a mountain side and part of the town. At the time, they claimed that the burn was so hot that it sterilized the top soil.
The “western-watersheds” article that Neo links claims that these super hot sterilized burns are wonderful for their special ecosystems. Yeah, maybe on a geologic time scale, but not a human time scale. Their rant about the horrors of a few tiny foresting roads is maybe a give away on their mindset.
Not that everything in that article is suspicious. The discussion on the severity of forest fires and how they spread is interesting. My old academic dept. had weekly guest science lectures, and one about 15 years ago was about a guy/group from Lawrence Livermore Labs, where they have super computers for their nuke bomb analyses, that developed a highly detailed model for wild fires and forest fires.
The model had everything it, except maybe sun drying of newly exposed vegetation (easily added). They took a severe fire in Topanga Canyon, 2 or 3 decades ago, and entered in all the initial conditions data which was extensive. With a few tweeks, the model worked perfectly. So those claims in the western-watersheds about what does and doesn’t work could be put to a solid scientific test via simulation.
There are lots of serious conservation scientists, but also lots of misanthropic environmentalists or pseudo environmentalists. Some used to call themselves “watermelons” before the internet went mainstream. Red on the inside and green on the outside. One of the co-founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, complains about the non-science political devolution of Greenpeace.
Now THIS…fire in the bushland…IS something Aussies know about & have made some of the same “green-idiot-suicidal” mistakes as CA pollies.
If you let the fuel loads build on the bush/forest floor, you’re gonna have a helluva fire come the dry season. Animals figure out how to get away from the controlled burns because they are managed…That thing they’ve got now, & Australia has had more than a few times in its recent history, is a killing machine.
Australia used to let ranchers graze their stock in the high country (think Man from Snowy River) and that helped. Cattle, I’m told, are also less destructive to the native vegetation than the wild Brumbies that so many are up in arms about now…but there’s nearly no grazing allowed any more…but the Brumbies breed like rabbits & are about as destructive.
The good news/bad news in this is in a year or so they’ll get to prove if they’ve learned anything…there’s always another wet season to dry season flip so there’ll surely be another chance to prevent or suffer a bad fire.
There are lots of serious conservation scientists, but also lots of misanthropic environmentalists or pseudo environmentalists.
I have a suggestion for the enviro Nazi element in San Francisco. Blow up Hetch Hetchy dam. There was a time, long ago, when the Sierra Club advocated blowing up the dam.
The problem is that the reservoir behind the dam supplies San Francisco’s water.
The O’Shaughnessy Dam was completed in 1923 and, after the necessary pipelines and power houses were completed, San Francisco began using water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir for its water supply and electrical power generation.
Carbon Dioxide and the Biosphere:
Years ago, an academic paper came out of Scotland claiming that the increased atmospheric CO2 was stimulating the growth of ragweed. I had to laugh. Those malicious CO2 molecules must be purposefully skipping over all the wheat, and barley, and corn, and grape crops and targeting the ragweed.
CO2 is plant food, and the less time plants spend breathing (their stomata open and close), the less water they need.
Some say crop yields are up 10% because of increased CO2. I once studied an article on the growth of world’s predominate rice plants vs. various increases in CO2. Naturally they went out of their way hide the actual crop yield changes. But the plant “panicles” where the grains are, grew by an extra 20 to 40% with our current level of CO2, compared to say the year 1900.
I believe there were some studies from several decades ago that considered the CO2 uptake of forests, and the forest efflux of CO2 from decaying matter. They concluded it was a wash. I don’t know if forest fires were included. So I don’t think most older global climate models consider forests an issue of much interest.
Then a few years ago someone did a detailed study of the Amazon rain forest. Surprise! They concluded that on net, it is a huge sink of CO2. Yes, it was growing faster than it had, as well.
Remember, this is all settled peer-reviewed science. No need for debate; no need for more research. Wait … We need lots more money for research, we’re just not going to debate it.
New England was much more open when the Natives ran it. They lived by hunting wild game and would constantly set fires to open up the forests to create meadows where the deer and other animals could graze. Old paintings of pre-Revolution NE show this plainly. It was even possible to drive a four horse carriage through the woods without roads.
That stopped a long time ago and much of NE is just forest. Surprisingly we don’t get forest fires even though the growth is very dense, which you can see in the large areas of conservation land around here. Further north, northern Maine is one vast unpopulated fir forest owned by the paper and lumber companies. I’ve never heard of a forest fire up there either.
Before the Europeans came the forests burned. Sometimes naturally, sometimes by fires set by the Indians. It is a natural cycle that actually improves the health of the forests. In the 1800s and early 1900s we logged the forests for lumber and fuel. That logging served much like forest fires. It opened up the forest increasing distance between trees creating natural fire breaks.
In the 1970s through the 1980s the environmentalists waged war on logging in the U.S. And the forests were protected as far as possible against forest fires. The result has been a buildup of heavy forests with corresponding dense understory that provides excellent fuel for the huge fires we see today.
Resuming logging where the forests are managed to provide merchantable timber to increase spacing between trees, as well as reducing the understory is one management tool that could be used. Logging out disease infested trees such as the pine bark beetle killed trees that provide usable lumber/pulpwood and gets rid of highly combustible fuels is another management strategy.
Allowing more cattle grazing in publicly owned timber areas is a strategy for reducing understory and making areas safer for controlled burns. The Forest Service and BLM are actively opposing cattle grazing on their lands.
None of the above will happen as long as the environmentalists have control of our policy on state and federally owned lands.
When I lived in LA during the 1960s and early 70s it was policy to bulldoze fire lines on the ridges all around the LA Basin that were covered with mesquite and other combustible foliage. Fires happened but they didn’t get out of control like they do now.
In1994 we were living in the Leavenworth WA area when the Rat Creek fire exploded a mile from our house. We lived in a hay meadow, but it had been cut and was well irrigated so was not very combustible. Our house had a metal roof. We had a good well with plenty of water available. The first two days were the worst. The winds were high and the fire was headed along the ridges to the east and west of us. The fire camp was 1/4 mile south of us. The firefighters came by and told us it was our call as to whether we should evacuate. We asked only that they give us a holler when they decided to evacuate. The winds died down but the weather stayed hot. For the next two weeks the fire burned slowly along the ridges and we doused the sparks that lit on our property. Our wood deck got singed a few times, but we felt reasonably in control. After three weeks the weather changed and we got a good rain storm. The fire came under control and was no longer a danger. The next two years the Forest Service allowed the logging of all the dead snags that the fire had created. It was all done by helicopter to prevent damage to the terrain, which was steep. Today, 25 years later, there is little evidence of that fire. And the tree spacing is such that a similar fire would not burn so hot and be so hard to control.
When people build their dream homes in forest land, they should be sure to clear at least an acre around their land, install a metal roof, keep combustible materials away from the house, have a good well, and an escape plan. Living in the mountains is wonderful, but it can quickly turn into a nightmare.
Controlled burns are an effective tool, until they aren’t, which is when they get out of control. The Indians just set the fires and let them burn until they burned out. They were uncontrolled burns that didn’t have to worry about burning a lot of infrastructure. Controlled burns are much more difficult. Logging and thinning only have to be done every ten years or so. Controlled burns have to be done more frequently. An economic value is obtained from logging and thinning. Controlled burns don’t have an economic value. The enviros hate the idea of making money from nature, so that’s another reason things aren’t going to change.
All the above is what I suggest to make wild fires more manageable, but it’s not going to happen until the environmentalists get a grip on reality.
Paul in Boston:
We don’t get forest fires here because it’s way too wet, even in the hot weather. We don’t have a rainy season and a dry season, as you no doubt know.
We also don’t have Santa Ana winds, but it’s mostly because of the much wetter climate that we are largely protected from huge forest fires.
There was a severe fire in Laguna Beach some years ago when I still lived nearby.
After the fire had destroyed a lot of the city, especially the ridge line houses, there was one house left. It was the only house left on the ridge that faced the ocean. It had been built by an architect who built it specifically to be fire proof. It worked. I imagine he was very busy the next few years.
An article about the house.
Another article about the house.
That doesn’t solve the problem of fires but there are ways to design houses that have a better chance to survive.
MikeK, 2nd article very good for anyone building a house — even here in fairly humid northern Illinois. I grew up on a farm, and one worry was about fires in cornfields near the house. This isn’t really prairie-fire country, but in the states to our west it is, or at least used to be.
And of course there are always fires that get started from lightning strikes or even bonfires.
Thanks.
part of this because we can’t water our yards, or trees around the properties. we have a water problem that keeps being pushed away. add that to the uncontrolled forested areas… well, we see what happens
Gable, that’s the other part, not directly related to forest management. California needs water. It’s been avoiding water retention and management issues for years as its population ballooned.
“The O’Shaughnessy Dam was completed in 1923 and, after the necessary pipelines and power houses were completed, San Francisco began using water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir for its water supply and electrical power generation.”
The Hetch Hetchy pipleine through Silicon Valley runs a block from my house.
part of this because we can’t water our yards, or trees around the properties. we have a water problem that keeps being pushed away. add that to the uncontrolled forested areas… well, we see what happens
Then don’t. They have desert gardens all over Phoenix. Some of them quite handsome.
About the water problem, try a constitutional Amendment which:
1. Annuls extant water rights
2. Sets aside a fixed sum through bond issues to indemnify current holders of water rights.
3. Provides for a series of temporary hearing examiners to make quick and dirty decisions on claimant’s share of the total indemnity
4. Assigns water rights to a federal corporation.
—
5. Federal statutory legislation passed pursuant could provide for the assemblage and recruitment of a police force to catch poachers and a more elaborate infrastructure to monitor draws on federal water resources.
6. Consequent to that, multiple price auctions could be held periodically (perhaps quarterly) for shares of a global consumption tranche whose dimensions are determined by ecological criteria.
7. The buyers then make use of their purchase for their own enterprises and or sell shares on a secondary-market exchange. Local water authorities can purchase on a primary or secondary market.
8. Local water authorities then adjust prices in response to their costs. Because they’re natural monopolies (and generally public) their prices are controlled. We might study some alternatives, e.g. having regulatory controls on the compensation per worker water authorities can pay and controls on their level of retained income. Permissible compensation per worker would be adjusted each year according to the change in mean compensation per worker within the region and retained income limits could be adjusted each year in accordance with the changes in nominal corporate earnings in the region. Any income in excess of the permissible sum at the end of the fiscal year would be partitioned between residential and commerical / institutional customers, with the residential portion rebated to those customers on a per-household basis and the commercial / institutional portion rebated on a per – FTE basis. With these controls in place, you might just allow the board of the water authority to adjust prices without regulatory interference, provided they gave 30 days notice and maintained a four-fold price structure (residential v. commercial, peak v. normal).
9. With the foregoing, the principal manifestation of drought will be spikes in water prices. People in their residences will make the necessary adjustments in their consumption when they see the bill. Commercial growers will substitute crops and take land out of production. Some will attempt to hedge against the threat of high water prices by futures and options trading.
Good evidence indicates the US east of the Mississippi is more densely wooded now than in the 1700s despite the burgeoning population.
Most of that land is in private hands. Timber harvesting does indeed go on.
In the West, most of the treed lands are Federal. The NFS is charged with multi-use management (hiking, etc) and literally does not have enough actual foresters on its payroll. I ran into a Forest Service guy in the Smokies in 1973, and he said he got out into the ‘field’ only two days/year.
Smokey the Bear mindset has stalled NF timber management for close to 100years now. Don’t touch dem trees!
Trees drink water! Cedars are especially thirsty, very invasive, and totally useless to man and beast. In the late 1800s there were year-round mountain streams in the Davis Mtns of W Tx, with trout! All long dry due to cedar/mesquite overgrowth.
What happens when the can is kicked for a century. Thanks, Sierra Club!
Cicero – Cedar is actually quite useful as a building material, but it can only be used if it’s logged and managed.
Sierra Club delenda est.
Cicero; AesopFan:
In the link I gave about the Oakland furor over eucalyptus, it was the Sierra Club that wanted to cut them all down. The Sierra Club’s position is not what you may think it is. Here are some Sierra Club recommendations concerning controlled burns:
As for logging and thinning, the Sierra Club is opposed to clear-cutting, but not to some forms of thinning:
There are other environmental groups a lot more opposed than the Sierra Club.
Neo, I was a Life member of Sierra Club before resigning. It lacks redeeming values.
SC is a money-sucking org that provides little actual enviro benefit compared to its revenues. The Nature Conservancy used to buy and hold until a Wall Streeter became CEO, and now it is a global org with more than a $billion to spend yearly. It owns a remote Pacific island that it flies its high donors out to! TNC sells carbon credits to Detroit Edison from their forest holdings in the Gulf South, and are so very concerned about potable water in Kenya that they are drilling wells for the hapless shoeless. And you thought a TNC donation was to be used to preserve America !
If I’m not mistaken, nearly all environmental groups are dead set against private ownership of currently public timberland and some of them want the timberland treated like parkland, our large inventories of parkland and preserves notwithstanding. The resource economist Steve Hanke has published on this subject in popular fora.
See Richard John Neuhaus on environmentalism: it’s a deeply misanthropic movement.
The Nature Conservancy used to buy and hold until a Wall Streeter became CEO, a
I had no idea that had happened to the Nature Conservancy. It’s been a while since I contributed, but I’ve always been fond of them. It seems every NGO is ruined sooner or later by some collection of ba*tards.
the Sierra Club is opposed to clear-cutting,
See Hanke’s contentions on clear cutting. The expanded road construction necessary to alternatives to clear cutting unleashes more environmental damage than the clear-cutting. When he was advancing this argument a generation ago, I ran it past an academic ecologist of my acquaintance (who doesn’t specialize in woodlands, to be sure). He’s a partisan Democrat, by the way. Yes, he said, Hanke’s contention was true, road construction does more damage than clear-cutting on balance; the real problem with clear cutting is when it’s done on certain high slopes, which are unsuitable for any kind of logging.